


Talk me to sleep

by andaleduardo



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Eddie Has Nightmares, I hope, It might seem like:, It's small and soft, M/M, Nightmares, Sleep Paralysis, Vivid imagination, but I don't know if it is, but I'm not good at writing it so it's not that scary, fear paralysis reflex, richie tries to help, slight terror, sonia kaspbrak - mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22137169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andaleduardo/pseuds/andaleduardo
Summary: There’s a woman by the window.He felt her before. Been feeling her for weeks, now.A slight movement as he twists his head in the kitchen. A weird sensation as he sits alone in the living room at night. Locking every window in the house, only to find them unlocked a few hours later.But now, now she’s here.Now he caught her.Perhaps, she caught him.OrEddie has nightmares. A familiar voice makes it a little easier to deal with.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 16
Kudos: 43





	Talk me to sleep

**Author's Note:**

> Important: This may sound like sleep paralysis, but I don't know if it is or not. I wrote this based on what I go through. Ever since I can remember I don't move after I have a nightmare, but it always feels like it is my choice not to move, so I don't associate that with the description of sleep paralysis episodes. I'm always aware that I could move if I tried to, that's why I think it's a fear reflex, simply. This is just so no one says I didn't write things correctly or something. I did, because this is just what I go through.  
> I'm writing this now because I've been having an awful time sleeping lately, maybe this will be a way of getting rid of things from my head.
> 
> Okay I hope you enjoy!

There's a woman by the window.

He can see her silhouette from the corner of his eye.

Every hair dusting his cold skin lifts up and brushes against his clothes like a cactus. Slowly, carefully, he turns his head. Scared to confirm that she's there even though he already has the answer. He felt her before. Been feeling her for weeks, now. A slight movement as he twists his head in the kitchen. A weird sensation as he sits alone in the living room at night. Locking every window in the house, only to find them unlocked a few hours later.

But now, now she's here.  
Now he caught her.  
Perhaps, she caught him.

He finally sees her. Her big, open, frozen eyes lock with his. She's smiling through the other side of the glass. A continuous string of blood pulses crowd his ears so there's nothing else he can hear but his own terror.  
He's unsafe, trapped.

_Please, let that window be locked. I locked it today. I did. I remember._

She doesn't move. The smile doesn't falter. Her eyes never leave him.

He tries not to blink but the burning sensation becomes unbearable. And just before it happens against his command, he swears her smile twitches.  
She’s not there when he opens his eyes.

The first thought is: _she’s gone._  
But the second, most likely, one is: _now she’s inside the house._

He pushes that horrible image out of his head with an audible gulp and walks towards the window on uneasy steps. What if she jumps onto the glass while he’s close to it? What if her face doesn’t look normal anymore?

He locks it, again, just before he hears something coming from the next room so, naturally, he runs over there in hopes he can lock everything in time.  
But when he bursts through the bedroom door, the room is freezing. The curtains are moving with the air coming in through the open glass.

She’s there. One leg over the windowsill, the same smile on her lips and the same big, wide eyes staring back at him.

With an unlikely bravery, he storms over to her and that seems to be enough to scare the woman away. She looks startled for a moment, jumps away from the house, and disappears like before.

He takes a minute to catch his breath and try to make sense of the situation. But he isn’t fooled.  
Without wasting a second, he closes that same window. He wants to check every part of the house again, but something tells him to go back in the other room, first.

That’s what he does, determined to keep this person away from his home. His steps echo through the walls but the sound is still being muffled under his heartbeat. As he rounds the corner of the doorway, he barely has time to acknowledge the window is, once more, wide open.

They lock eyes.

She’s smiling.

She’s hiding under the dining table.

Eddie opens his eyes with an unnerving calmness, as if he didn’t just have another horrible nightmare. He stares at the darkness of his bedroom, body now on full alert.  
There’s sweat sticking his clothes to his skin, and the back of his neck is equally attached to the sheet as he lays there on his belly. His breathing is awfully jagged, awfully painful and awfully strained. He finds the faint shape of his inhaler resting on the bedside table. He wants it, he needs it.

But he can’t move.

These nightmares, they’ve always been here. Always this bad, always disturbing and freaky. He’s fine with them. Well, not _fine_ fine. He’s used to them. Ever since he can remember he’s had these kind of dreams. One of the oldest ones he remembers was about the end of the world. He’s had different versions of that one. Sometimes, he sees buildings crashing while he stands on top of one. In that dream, he does nothing but watch. It starts far away, when he sees the first building falling. Then there they go, one by one. The destruction approaches, wastes his whole night as he waits to feel the ground under his feet finally break.

Eventually, there’s no other building standing besides the one he’s on top of. He stares up ahead and waits. He knows he’s going to die. And as soon as he feels his leg going through the roof surface, he wakes up calmly. Always calmly and slowly.

But then the true horror begins. When he wakes up after a nightmare, there’s no chance he can go back to sleep. The first challenge to fight is his breathing. It hurts his tense ribcage until he can get it under control. Then he has to decide whether it’s scarier to keep his eyes open or closed. It really depends on the dream. When he dreams about the world ending, he likes to keep them closed. Or when he dreams he got shot, which is a very common dream for him. But tonight, tonight is a very bad night. His eyes hurt, it feels like he’s about to rip his eyelids apart with how much he’s straining them. He can feel her here, she’s here, with him. There’s a vague image wavering in his imagination that she is laying down on his carpet.

That’s the third issue, the one that keeps him awake for the rest of the night. He can’t leave the nightmare. It carries on to real life, it sticks on his brain and he feeds into it, he allows it to keep going. He’s the one in charge now, so he imagines all the scenarios possible along the lines of the dream.

He imagines the woman peering over the end of the bed, watching him laying down, smiling. All he has to do is lift his head and peer down at his feet, she’ll be there.

But then comes the fourth problem. He _really_ can’t move. He never tried and he refuses to. He bashes in his terror, adrenaline, sweat and thirstiness. And he stays like that until the sun lights up the room and he can hear his mom getting up. Only when she goes to his bedroom to check on him does he master the courage to ball his hands into fists, bend a knee, and finally, _finally_ get those awfully hot bed covers away from his body.

He doesn’t have them all that often, maybe once a month but not precisely. It’s not that hard to let the dreams go once he goes about his day, although he craves company at least on the same day as it happens. He even stays with his mom downstairs watching television until she goes up to her bedroom, following right behind.

Tonight, it’s particularly bad. The woman’s face doesn’t leave his thoughts. She looked like a regular person, except for the extremely open eyes and that unmoving smile, but she could be anyone’s neighbour or even a sweet family member. Eddie shivers, looks at his inhaler and tries to convince his brain that he needs to cover up his head with the heavy blanket on his bed. The only movement of his body are shivers and choked up breaths. Unaware that he wants to cry, Eddie gives in to his vivid imagination that convinces him that one of woman’s legs is right under his bed.

For Eddie, this is the reality: he’s in his bed, it’s probably around 2 a.m. and he isn’t alone. There’s a stranger laying down on his carpet, smiling at the ceiling.

“What’s going on?”

The words don’t come from his mouth. That’s the trigger that makes him burst out crying, sure that this is it. This is the end. She’s going to murder him in his own bed and he can’t move a single muscle to protect himself.

Then there’s a pair of hands settling on Eddie’s shoulders, a touch so soft that would confuse the hell out of him if he could pay attention to it. Instead, his throat squeezes and he lets out sobs and panicked whimpers, for he can’t form words. It’s really hard to tell if he’s still dreaming or not, because it feels just like those where you can’t run when you most need to.

“Hey, it’s just me.” It’s merely a whisper, and the hands he felt before are now working together to turn Eddie’s body around. He wants to squeeze his eyes, drown in the darkness. But then he’s lying on his back, finally feeling some cold air brushing his chest, and he sees Richie.

“Hi, buddy.” Richie smiles. Eddie’s gotten used to the dark bedroom by now, so he sees him clearly with the poor light coming in from the window. “You had another nightmare?”

This is when things start clearing up a bit. Sometimes Richie sleeps over at his house. So far, he witnessed one of these episodes, and he had to figure out what to do all alone because Eddie wasn’t exactly able to cooperate. That night was different, Eddie managed to fall back asleep because the dark reality was completely shattered once Richie appeared in it.

Eddie’s eyes swim around Richie’s face, trying to grasp it. He watches him reaching over to the side table and grab the inhaler, pressing it against Eddie’s mouth gently. The sound of it fills up the bedroom as Eddie’s cries die down.

After putting the inhaler back, Richie swipes a thumb under Eddie’s eyes and takes a minute to ponder his options.

“You’re really warm and sweaty, spaghetti.”

Eddie stares at him. It makes him uneasy just to think about Richie pushing the covers to the end of the bed like he did last time. It had taken another hit from the inhaler to get him to calm down, and eventually Richie gave up and buried both of them under the covers. Blankets have that power to them, as if they could save you from anything evil.  
Eddie still has the woman’s face glued to the back of his mind. As much as he tries to concentrate on Richie, he can only wander a few steps away from the source of his fear. If he doesn’t focus hard enough, he knows he’ll get stuck with her very easily for the rest of the night.

Eventually, Richie sighs and gives in, moving Eddie’s body again so they’re both on his sides. He intertwines their legs, slides one arm under Eddie’s head and uses the other to pull the covers all the way up, leaving just a small crease around their faces so that they can breathe easily.

And then, Richie talks. In soft whispers, enough to keep Eddie’s thoughts away from bad things. About mundane things, funny things, basic things. What he had for dinner, what his plans for the weekend are, whatever new joke he’s working on. And even though Eddie can’t answer, he listens carefully while looking into Richie’s face. Richie watches him back with a nervous blush that can’t be seen in the night, but he keeps on talking and allows Eddie to do whatever it is that he needs to do when he gets in this mind-space. Eddie’s just, studying him or something. But it seems to work so Richie doesn’t care.

After all, Eddie will relax and fall back asleep soon, and then it’ll be Richie studying him, instead. His features, eyes, nose, lips, damp hair glued to his forehead and so on, always unaware that he is doing it, at first. And then fully aware of the guilt settling in his stomach.

It’s a deceiving word. Richie’s nightmares were born under the sun light by the quarry and have been following him ever since then. During the day, painting his nights, keeping him company hour after hour.

He hugs Eddie’s body closer so that he can’t stare at his face any longer. Or at least that’s what he has to tell himself to be able to sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> I never tried to write anything "scary"? Is this even scary? It sure was when I dreamt about it. It tormented me for days and this particular nightmare has been on my mind lately and it doesn't let me sleep so HERE. I'll write about it, see if it leaves me alone !!
> 
> But well, this was short and pointless in a way, I still hope anyone likes it.
> 
> Please consider leaving me a comment! I'd like to know if did an okay job at writing something more freaky. probably not, I'm not even sour about it, I hate scary stuff.


End file.
